


neatly-coiled contradictions

by thedevilbites



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Another Mip fic, Canon Typical Swearing, Established Relationship, F/M, Introspection, Kink Exploration, Knifeplay, Painplay, Past Trauma Mentioned, Rough Sex, Rough but cute!!, Sexual Content, Their own brand of fighting and fucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:53:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27701650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilbites/pseuds/thedevilbites
Summary: Lip freezes mid-step, then drops his bag carelessly on the floor, and sucks in a long, strained breath.“What the fuck are you doing?”“You said we had to talk about the knife thing,” Mandy says, falling back a step to sit on Lip’s bed, “so, I’m improvising.”
Relationships: Lip Gallagher/Mandy Milkovich
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	neatly-coiled contradictions

**Author's Note:**

> i've been really into exploring Lip and Mandy's darker kinks because YES of course they have them. honestly i don't think i can visualize these two without them getting super kinky/rough with each other--i think that's one of the key elements in their relationship that really allows them to work well together. also i think that them hurting each other is just so...cute?? i dont know why, that's just the way i'm wired but they've got this amazing "lift me up, but pull me down and choke me a little" dynamic that i am insanely obsessed with. also maybe it's just a South Side thing, you know, like the harsh environment/universal deity-like forces of the South Side have culminated into bringing Lip and Mandy together while giving them a healthy dose of craziness...

Mandy sleeps over at his place most nights, now. It’s—it’s different. It’s _nice._

They fight more often, but they fuck more often as well. She supposes that that’s nice, too, actually, the whole “fight, fuck, and then fight some more” thing they’ve got going on. It’s not like she doesn’t get pleasure from either one, that same adrenaline weaving its way into her limbs until she can’t tell if she’s angry or aroused or both.

So—it’s simple tradeoffs, then. An easy equilibrium compared to what she would find in her own home. 

That doesn’t mean Mandy’s any less viscous, though.

One night she comes home, and ends up throwing a lamp at his forehead. Just because. Just for the _fun_ of it.

She’s drunk, also, wavering right on the border of pleasantly buzzed and something...not as nice, the many rounds of cocktails and sticky, sweet-sour wine burning in the back of her throat. Bringing her back to strange men in dark places that she really doesn’t want to think about—there’s a reason why it’s called _trauma_ —so, that might have something to do with it as well.

Lip dodges the lamp shade seconds before it reaches him, watches the bulb shatter against his bedroom wall while she furiously grabs at the next closest thing to her—a slightly-burnt sneaker?—and hurls it at his head.

It collides with his nose and his head snaps backwards while she snorts, oddly satisfied at the _crack_ of pain reverberating around the room, and leaps for an ashtray by his windowsill.

She’s always been fast—sharpest reflexes out of all her fucked-up brothers, fastest mile time out of the bitches in high school who used to make fun of her teeth—so she reaches it just in the nick of time, fingers clawed around the ceramic rim—

She’s fast, but Lip’s _faster._

He bodily collides with her while she’s in a crouch, knocks the wind out of her—Jesus _fuck,_ she finally understands what that expression means—and they end up half on his bed and half off of it, Lip awkwardly on top of her. 

“Mandy,” Lip spits at her, wincing as she tries to knee him in the balls, “can you fucking slow down?”

Mandy, of course, ignores him. 

“You’re bleeding,” she hisses at him instead, overjoyed, flexing her wrists adamantly from where they’ve somehow ended up in his hands. 

“Yeah, thanks for the tip,” he snarks, winds a free hand between their bodies up to his nose where—yup, it’s just like she said, half-dried blood was caked along his philtrum. 

“No problem.”

He stares down at her for a second, as if deliberating about what, exactly, he should do with her, then asks point-blank, “Why are we fighting?”

“Because,” she says apathetically, slanting her tongue over the ridges of her gums, “I felt like it.”

“Yeah, well, next time you feel like it, mind warning me first? Maybe go outside so we can sort, uh,” he maneuvers her wrists awkwardly over her head, then gestures to her body with his other hand, “whatever _this_ is without breaking furniture?”

“Sure, I’ll give you a little _heads up_ next time.”

He visibly stiffens at her sardonic tone. “No, Mandy—look I’m serious. This shit isn’t cheap.”

She rolls her eyes, glances at a stray shard of glass from the demolished lamp by the foot of his bed. Big deal, it’s just a fucking lamp. 

Lip’s still talking about it, though, but Mandy decides she’s had enough of this conversation.

She arches her back as much as she can in the minimal space between them, prepares to extend her leg and go for his balls again—but stops short suddenly.

She doesn’t fully get how she knows, exactly. Maybe when you’ve been exposed to as much violence as she has, you get a feel for these things. A sixth sense, perhaps.

So, Mandy goes on the offensive. 

“Do you want to hurt me?” She simpers, cutting him off, falling back into that syrupy-sweet voice she uses when her clients are a little shy, perhaps, a little slow on the uptake; when she knows what they need before they even understand it themselves. 

Lip opens his mouth, then settles for silence. 

A moment later, he simply says, “Yes,” and presses his body closer, until she can feel the ridges of his abdomen taut against her stomach. 

Oh. Mandy’s—well, she certainly wasn’t expecting that, but she’s a Milkovich, she can roll with the punches.

“Okay,” Mandy says back, just as bluntly, because there really isn’t much to say, and eloquence stopped being a priority when she came home and started assaulting him with furniture. 

She expects him to slap her, go for immediate satisfaction, but Lip only blinks down at her as she licks her lips and rasps, “Well?” voice a little too raw and needy for her liking. 

There‘s a pause. The calm before the storm, or whatever dumb metaphor could be applied to the sudden silence between them. She sags gracelessly against him, trying not to squirm. 

Lip seems to be relaxed, however, almost pensive, which was certainly rare for the two of them. Less “calm before the storm,” and more appraising, as if he’s doing some complex calculation in his mind for school, the ones that always went way over her head. 

Back when they first got together, she used to be anxious, jealous even, of how effortless it all was for him.

Lip always had a place in his mind that she could never follow him into. It used to infuriate her. _Unnerve_ her. 

Now, she supposes, it doesn’t particularly bother her. It’s more of something she simply acknowledges, this separation between them, and doesn’t really care about. At least, not anymore, not in the ways that really matter, down the road. Also, she likes to think she’s matured since her past, possessive, Karen-murdering days, and—

And then Lip suddenly _growls,_ like some fucking rabid dog from one of those old-time horror movies, and all coherent thought dissipates from Mandy’s mind. 

She rears up, and Lip allows it, watches her throw her head back and flex her hips helplessly against him, hyper-aware of his hands on her wrists and his teeth bared at her neck and his leg slotted neatly in the axis of her thighs, pushing, pulsing, _pinching_ —

It’s all teeth and swollen skin and jewel-bright, cherry-red stains after that.

She likes to look at his eyes, when it happens. 

They’re black and glassy. Parasitic, almost. Two dark leeches lengthening and contracting within his corneas.

It’s hard not to notice the madness tucked away within them when he’s like this, she thinks, then wonders who else has seen it. It’s not like he actively spends a lot of time hiding it, though. That neatly-slotted frenzy lurking just below the surface. 

When Lip landed their high school Physical Education teacher in the emergency room during freshman year she remembers the school therapist coming into her classroom, and making a curt analysis of the situation, claiming Lip was _clearly suffering from a case of rapidly building psychosis, and should be transferred to a state penitentiary immediately._

Only that quack had a degree in what was essentially squabbling _bullshit,_ and school therapists didn’t know _fuck all_ about what that fucking perverted PE teacher had been doing to her behind closed doors. Besides, she’d seen the damage, and she was pretty sure Lip’s “psychosis” would probably have to extend to not only Lip, but also his brothers, and a fair share of her own siblings, too.

Which only goes to say, that, maybe all of them are a little fucked-up on the inside.

He’s only cut her a few times. 

And each of those times, she’s fervently expressed her approval—unnecessarily loudly, perhaps, but approval nonetheless—because Lip seems to have some apprehension when it comes to knives. Or, to be more exact, of mixing her and knives together.

Out of everything they’ve done, Mandy didn’t expect _that_ to be a sticking point for him. That’s why she approaches the subject gently, or, as gently as Mandy can be, really, by waiting until he comes home from school one day, and slicing her thigh clean open with a kitchen knife.

Lip freezes mid-step, then drops his bag carelessly on the floor, and sucks in a long, strained breath.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“You said we had to talk about the knife thing,” Mandy says, falling back a step to sit on Lip’s bed, “so, I’m improvising.”

 _“This,”_ Lip motions to her thigh, eyes locked on the blood now slipping over her calf muscle, “is insane.”

“Lip, we’ve done this before. What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” Lip takes a drag of a cigarette she hadn’t noticed he’d been holding, “is that you’re bleeding to death on my floor.”

“Dumbass, this isn’t a problem. This is _hot._ You're telling me you aren't turned on right now?”

Lip swallows, ignores her, and appraises his sheets, now visibly wet. Then he looks at her leg again. “I don’t know Mandy, but _death_ sounds like a bit of an issue to me.”

“Jesus, you dick, I’m not gonna die.” She jostles her thigh a little, and then hisses angrily on instinct, hands clenched into fists, unable to censor herself.

“You sure you're—“ 

_“Lip,_ just—just come here,” she interrupts, beckoning him and only half-heartedly upset, and her voice kind of tapers off at the end when she realizes she’s horizontal.

When he splays his hands over the wound she almost cries out, but grits her teeth and manages to get away with a sharp gasp.

“I think you overdid it,” Lip is saying from somewhere above her at the same time that she manages a strangled _“fucking cocksucker”_ when he bends her leg up, albeit somewhat roughly, at the knee.

Lip raises an eyebrow, and she goes to sit up, “I didn’t _overdo_ —“

He aligns his palm flat against the cut, and she whimpers just at that, but he presses down, _hard._ This time she _does_ cry out, can feel a rivulet of blood seep out of the wound, and her vision flickers black around the edges. 

Mandy falls back on the bed in a trembling, graceless heap.

Normally, she’d call him a little bitch for playing dirty, but now all she can manage is to lift her finger and weakly flip him off. Her thighs are slick and slippery with blood. 

Lip’s answering laughs prickles against her skin, but then he closes his mouth over the wound, and she lets out a strangled moan, muscles spasming as if she’s been electrocuted. 

When he swipes his tongue over the open skin, the exposed muscle hanging in strips there, Mandy almost comes from this and this _alone_ because the pain is—the pain is overpowering and intoxicating and _electrifying_ and this is simultaneously _everything_ and _nothing_ like she ever expected—

Her vision fades away, and then the world is surmised of just him and her, drifting in something murky and dark and ageless until the sun comes up.

**Author's Note:**

> late night Mip fics are so fun to write. i am obsessed. 
> 
> @thedevilbites on tumblr, come say hi/discuss what other kinky shit Lip and Mandy get up to in their free time.


End file.
